After meeting the Wordsworths at Charles Lamb's, on the 9th May 1815, Henry Crabb Robinson wrote in his _Diary_: "It is the mere power which he is conscious of exerting in which he delights, not the production of a work in which men rejoice on account of the sympathies and sensibilities it excites in them. Hence, he does not much esteem his _Laodamia_, as it belongs to the inferior class of poems founded on the affections." (See _Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence_, vol. i. p. 482.) Wordsworth wrote thus to Walter Savage Landor, from Rydal Mount, on the 21st of January 1824:-- "You have condescended to minute criticism upon the _Laodamia_.[D] I concur with you in the first stanza, and had several times attempted to alter it upon your grounds. I cannot, however, accede to your objection to the 'second birth,' merely because the expression has been degraded by Conventiclers.[E] I certainly meant nothing more by it than the _eadem cura_, and the _largior æther_, etc., of Virgil's Sixth _Æneid_. All religions owe their origin or acceptation to the wish of the human heart to supply in another state of existence the deficiencies of this, and to carry still nearer to perfection what we admire in our present condition, so that there must be many modes of expression arising out of this coincidence, or rather identity of feeling common to all Mythologies; and under this observation I should shelter the phrase from your censure--but I may be wrong in the particular case, though certainly not in the general principle. This leads to a remark in your last--'that you are disgusted with all books that treat of religion.' I am afraid it is a bad sign in me, that I have little relish for any other. Even in poetry it is the imaginative only, viz., that which is conversant with or turns upon Infinity, that powerfully affects me. Perhaps I ought to explain: I mean to say that except in those passages, where things are lost in each other, and limits vanish, and aspirations are raised, I read with something too like indifference; but all great Poets are in this view powerful Religionists." In 1815 Charles Lamb wrote to Wordsworth, "_Laodamia_ is a very original poem; I mean original with reference to your own manner. You have nothing like it. I should have seen it in a strange place, and greatly admired it, but not suspected its derivation." (_The Letters of Charles Lamb_, edited by Alfred Ainger, vol. i. p. 284.)